Can Social Media Desexualize the Nipple?

With help from celebrities like Rihanna and Scout Willis, will the Free the Nipple movement succeed in making breasts as boring as elbows?

By
Eliza Thompson

Jun 06, 2014

If you have eyes and an Internet connection, you know that Monday, Rihanna made what is likely her biggest sartorial statement to date. She showed up to the CFDA Awards — often nicknamed "the Oscars of fashion" — in an Adam Selman dress that the designer himself described as "just fishnet and crystals and a couple of fingers crossed." About a month earlier, Rihanna found herself in trouble with Instagram after she posted topless (read: extremely nippletastic) photos of her Lui magazine photo shoot. The racy pictures caused Instagram to delete her account, allegedly by mistake, but when they reinstated it, Rihanna deleted it herself, seemingly as a "fuck you" to the company and their puritanical terms of use. Though nobody really knows what motivated Rihanna to wear a dress that was essentially just a sparkly, see-through body stocking, it's hard not to think it was partially politically motivated, as if to say, "Here I am on the biggest night in fashion, wearing this in front of a million cameras and people Instagramming me. What the fuck are you gonna do about it?" As she actually said to one reporter, "Why, my tits bother you?"

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsNcPsP6-VI

A few days before Rihanna bared all, Scout Willis wandered around New York City topless after Instagram deleted her account because she posted a sweatshirt featuring a topless woman. In an essay for XOJane, Willis explained the reasoning behind her actions, writing, "I am not trying to argue for mandatory toplessness, or even bralessness. What I am arguing for is a woman's right to choose how she represents her body — and to make that choice based on personal desire and not a fear of how people will react to her or how society will judge her. No woman should be made to feel ashamed of her body."

And lest you think we should all just get over it and cover ourselves up on Instagram, remember that bizarre moral outrage over an areola goes way beyond social media. Way back in the olden days, CBS was fined $550,000 for Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime nipple exposure, while this year, the Red Hot Chili Peppers all went shirtless and almost no one said anything about it except, "Wow, Anthony Kiedis looks kinda good for his age." Just last week, a poster for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For was banned because Eva Green was showing too much "curve of under breast" and "dark nipple/areola circle visible through sheer gown." A new, slightly altered one was released Thursday, and guess what? The suggestion of nipples is completely gone, so now Eva looks like a nipple-less Barbie doll. Cool.

The war on the nipple is not limited to celebrities, though. Regular, non-famous women have dealt with this issue as well. A Canadian mom had her Instagram account shut down after she posted a photo of herself breastfeeding, and could only have it reinstated after deleting several posts (Instagram said that photos of the woman's young daughter topless qualified as "child pornography"). And yet male celebrities and regular dudes you know post photos of themselves topless all the time, without raising any eyebrows. James Franco gets away with partially exposed pubes in a highly sexualized bathroom selfie. Meanwhile on Facebook, photos of guns and videos of beheadings are A-OK (though the community guidelines make clear that violent videos posted for "sadistic effect or to celebrate or glorify violence" are not allowed). So, what gives with the nipple?

Part of the problem is that the female nipple is still so inherently sexualized. Men fought for the right to go topless in public way back in the 1930s, and it became the social norm; while they still (usually) have to wear shirts in bars, offices, restaurants, etc., the sight of a naked male torso is so commonplace that it usually takes a fair amount of baby oil and visible pubic bone to sex up a shirtless guy even a little bit. After Rihanna's CFDA appearance though, Wendy Williams was incensed enough to call her look "totally inappropriate," at which point the audience applauded. Williams also said RiRi looked like she was heading to a "down-low sex party," and that a real "lady" like Jennifer Lopez "shows you just enough to leave you wanting more." Arlene Santana, an E! News correspondent, thought Rihanna's look "shouldn't be allowed" because "1 in 3 women are raped in India" and "women are still being discriminated against for being females." Hear that, ladies? Your sexy outfits are the reason you're getting raped.

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When you get right down to it, though, nipples are purely practical. Sure, they have their uses during sex, but biologically, they are only there so that you can feed your children. Their actual purpose is exactly the same as the one your dog's nipples have. They are only "taboo" because some arbitrary societal force decided they are too risqué to be seen in public.

Alethea Andrews, who cofounded a topless book club to prove that nipples are really no big deal, thinks the whole nipple thing is "clearly a purely social construct." "In some societies, women's nipples are nothing special," Andrews explained. "But in our society, such a big deal is made about the need to cover them up that of course hearts go all aflutter any time they're exposed. If we spent a few decades saying that noses had to be covered, the sight of a nostril on the Super Bowl would launch a thousand editorials."

The group members of the club — called the Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society — meet in New York City parks, where God and everybody can see them. "It's been legal for 20 years for women in New York to go topless anywhere a man can, but you never saw any women actually doing it," Andrews said of the idea behind the club. "Clearly it wasn't because no woman would ever want to; it was because most women didn't know it was legal and the ones who did know were too nervous or scared to try it. So we just decided to start a group that would combat this ignorance and fear, and give women the safety in numbers it would take to feel comfortable enjoying their legal rights." It is indeed legal to go topless in New York and, in fact, legal in many states. The official holdouts include Tennessee, Indiana, and Utah, and in about a dozen other states, like New Jersey, the laws are ambiguous enough that women will likely still be fined should they bare their nipples in public.Last year, for example, a topless rights activist was arrested for refusing to pay the $816 she was fined for twice going topless on a Jersey beach in 2008.

There's of course also the fear that baring your breasts in public will incur the wrath of strangers, draw unwanted attention from men, or invite nasty comments about bodies that don't look like Rihanna's. But when I asked Andrews about any negative responses to the book club, she said they haven't had many problems. "I can't tell you how many women have come by to tell us we're inspiring, especially older women who say things like, 'I wish people were doing this when I was your age,'" Andrews explained. "Mothers with young children introduce their kids to us, to give them an example of healthy body image, and there are men, too, who greet us sincerely and non-creepily. Are there creeps? Sure. This is New York, this is the real world; there are always some. But surprisingly few."

Like Scout Willis, I'm not arguing that everybody go topless all the time. There's a time and a place. Work or school isn't it, eating in a restaurant isn't it, hanging out with your boyfriend's mom isn't it. Running on the track at the park probably isn't even it, because without a sports bra that shit would fucking hurt. But this constant handwringing over exposed female nipples is just one more example of how society continues to find the smallest, stupidest ways to keep women down.

While one breastfeeding mom in Canada doesn't have the power to change the policy of a social network made up of 200 million users, Rihanna probably does have that power. She might not be on Instagram anymore, and Instagrams of her in that dress might get you banned, but how sustainable is that policy in the long run? You can go pretty much anywhere else on the Internet and see her in all her nearly naked glory. Twitter, for example, is still full of uncensored, nipply Rihanna pictures. It can't be long until other social networks loosen up a little bit too. After all, if @badgalriri herself will give up Instagram for a different medium that allows her to bare all, surely other people will too.

Ironically, then, it is probably the very pushback women's nipples have gotten from certain social media platforms that will ultimately desexualize them, or at least make them commonplace. We've now all seen Rihanna's nipples — and who cares? They are practically elbows.